Kent John Chabotar, St. Francis ’67, is the President of Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. He took time out of preparing for the academic year to chat with the Fraternity.
DSF: Tell us about where you’re from originally and what made you go to St. Francis for college.
KC: I am from New York City, Manhattan actually. The family moved to the Philadelphia suburbs in 1958. I went to a high school taught by the same Franciscan order of priests that ran St. Francis College, now Saint Francis University. I knew I’d be with some familiar faces. SFC also gave me a full scholarship. To a kid from a family with modest means and no previous college graduates, that was huge. The final factor was the academic reputation of the school back then, and now for that matter. They were known to have small classes, first class teachers, good interactions with students, and a good social life.
DSF: So you went there and majored in political science. What were your plans for when you got out?
KC: I really didn’t have any plans except to go to graduate school. I came into college thinking that I would go to college for a while, then after graduation go to work in politics, not so much elected politics but more like Congress in a staff position. I decided in my senior year to apply to grad school. I was in student government, and so I knew that political science wasn’t going to be practical. I felt that, as the application of political science to real jobs in government, public administration would be. I applied to various places and was accepted into various places. I went to the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, which back then and still now is the #1 school of Public Administration in the US according to US News and World Report. That was the good news, but the bad news was that I didn’t know that when I applied, and had never visited the place. I did the classic, “I want to go back to New York, but not the city, so what’s upstate. Oh, Syracuse is kinda central, so I’ll go there.” (Laughs) One of the best moves I ever made, and I never tell students the whole truth, but that’s how I got to Syracuse. Plus, they gave me a full scholarship.
DSF: So you got into the #1 school, and received a full scholarship. That’s pretty impressive.
KC: Are you noticing that, like Jerry Maguire in the movies, I insist that schools “show me the money”? Yes, a full fellowship – a NASA fellowship. NASA was led at that time by someone with a Public Administration background, not an Engineer or Scientist, and in the running of NASA they realized that they needed more Managers. They figured why not support the training of public managers, so they gave Syracuse five fellowships to distribute to Public Administration students, and I got one of them. It covered all of my tuition and fees, provided an office and travel money, and paid me a $300 monthly stipend, real money in 1968! I was only supposed to be at Syracuse for a one year master’s degree, but it was a four year fellowship designed to get a doctorate. I thought to myself, “what can I do with a doctorate? I’m not really sure, but it’s got to be a good thing, and it’s four fully paid years. When am I going to get that again?” So I decided to apply for the doctoral program, got in, and earned a Ph.D. when I was 26. I wish I could say this whole thing was a master plan, but it wasn’t.
DSF: Going back to your time at St. Francis, what made you decide to join the Delta Sig chapter on campus?
KC: The Beta Phi chapter was the most intellectual and academic fraternity there, #1. Number 2, they had great social events. Number 3, probably the biggest factor, was that my roommate my freshman year, Michael C. Baressi, pledged in his freshman year, and was very happy. He ended up being the President of the house, and literally when I pledged as a junior, he signed my certificate, which I still have. Incidentally, a brother in my pledge class, Gregg Neylan, just dropped off his granddaughter as a first year student at Guilford College. I felt old that day even if Gregg and I still look “fab-u-lous.”
DSF: Tell the readers a little more about Guilford College, where you serve as the school’s 8th President.
KC: The college is 2,700 students, and has grown 42% since 2002, and has been able to cut its acceptance rate by 50% in the same time period. The college is half adults and half traditional aged students. The budget is approximately $65 million per year, and the endowment is approximately $70 million, which is not large, but I’d rather have $70 million than nothing clearly. The college’s biggest major is business management. The other big majors are biology, psychology and English, and also, criminal justice studies. It is only undergraduate. It is an indepdendent liberal arts college founded in 1837 as a boarding school by the Society of Friends or Quakers. The Quakers have always believed in practical education, the term they use is “all things civil and useful.” Thus, when it became a college in 1888, Guilford was always one that didn’t believe in being totally business or totally liberal arts, but tried to combine both. A student cannot graduate from Guilford with a bachelor’s degree unless they sample from all five divisions – so an art student has to take business and a business student has to take art. You can’t get out of here without being classically well rounded – at least that is the intent.
DSF: What made you decide that being a college president was where you wanted your career to go, and why 5 years ago was Guilford a good fit for you?
KC: Again, I wish it was a master plan, but it was just like when I bumbled into being a grad student and bumbled into my Ph.D. The only thing that was planned was teaching at a college. I didn’t know I wanted to be an administrator. I was basically a faculty member at Michigan State University, the University of Massachusetts and then Harvard who also did management consulting. I was recruited to be the CFO at Bowdoin because they challenged me by saying all this stuff you teach in the classroom, including to college presidents at the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents – which I still teach in – all this stuff may work in theory, but does it work in the real world? So, I went off to Bowdoin to be the CFO. I promised to stay three years, and told them that it would take five to get what was needed, done, wound up staying 11, and was then looking for something else to do when the president who hired me retired.
One thing I considered doing after Bowdoin was in fact being a college president. A second was continuing on as a Chief Financial Officer probably at a larger college or university. Third was going back into the faculty closer to full time as I had done before I went to Bowdoin. And fourth was something in the financial industry. By March of 2002, the two best job offers I had simultaneously were to be the president of Guilford College, and to be the managing director of a new hedge fund. The hedge fund was nice, because they were two colleagues of mine who were starting it. They wanted me to be the Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer, and I had to put up no money of my own. They promised me 1% of the carry every year, and their last fund peaked at $1.7 billion. Work the math… But, you know, I had never done that except in theory, and I had done college life and I love being with students, which is the #1 thing I still love doing. It came down to, as one of my friends said, “Kent, do you want to make some money or do some good?” And the doing good part led me to accept this position.
DSF: In your biography, it states that you are the first non-Quaker president in the school’s history.
KC: I am the first non-Quaker head of school since the school was founded in 1837. They were so desperate to hire someone who could count 1 and 1 and get 2, that they would have taken a Quaker, or anyone else who could count and knew finance regardless of religion. (Laughs) That happened to be me. I admire the Quakers and their deserved reputation for teaching excellence and peace, and this job has strengthened that impression. But I am not converting!
DSF: What is your leadership style?
KC: When I was asked this question during the search, I said “I believe in a closed door policy and I am a dictator so don’t get in my way.” (Laughs) I was joking obviously. I am not a micromanager. I am a faculty member essentially. I micromanage in maybe two areas. The first area is goal setting. I want the goals to be established for everybody and every department. However, I don’t try to micromanage the means. The second area is communications. Communications need to be frequent and honest and in English, which in some colleges, including ones where I have been in the past, is a challenge. Part of that is also being transparent. I don’t believe in hiding the ball. At Bowdoin and now at Guilford, we publish our annual budget online. We publish consulting reports online, you know like ones about our Bookstore, our dining services, our computing. We publish minutes of the senior staff and the Board of Trustees meetings. We have a searchable engine on the web site – Myths and Facts, which talks about the myths and facts about Guilford, Who Decides?, which we list a number of issues and who gets to decide them, and we have one about Whom to Contact?, for example on a particular issue like a grade change.
My philosophy is, if you’re not open with the data, people are going to start speculating, and usually speculations are worse than the reality. They always think that if they’re not in a meeting that they think is important “I wonder what goes on there…” For example, in senior staff, we deal with the annual budget, the strategic plan, feedback from parents and students, what we’re going to have for lunch that day, and whole variety of big and little issues. A lot of what we discuss is boring, but folks on the outside don’t know it until they can see it.
The other reason I do it is that, if I am make a decision after looking at a certain set of data or facts, and if I let those facts out to everyone else, people on campus should come to the same conclusion I did. And, if they don’t, I think there needs to be a discussion, because I could be wrong, or they could be wrong.
I was once told by someone that to be a successful college president you need to be interested in everything, but only to a certain point.
DSF: Your role is pretty all encompassing. How are you able to balance your work and personal life?
KC: It helps that I am single, so I can devote more time to the job than perhaps others might be able to with a family. I am also a trained administrator, and not a physicist or historian. Another factor is my favor is that after teaching college presidents for all of those years and learning from them, I set some ground rules when I got here that hold unless I override them in a particular circumstance. What are they? I don’t meet before 11 am to give me quiet time for writing and reflection. I don’t do two meal events in one day. I don’t do more than four meetings a day, but students don’t count in those four. Students are a priority. The day after I get back from a fundraising trip, the morning has to be left open for catch up. I do some work at night so my e-mail doesn’t overwhelm me, and I keep control of my own schedule. My office does. We do not let people schedule me all over the place, which really does help to set good priorities, and people realize the types of events that I will do and will not do. We may want to do them as a college, but maybe I’m not the right person to be there. Folks at Bowdoin called these Kent’s Commandments, and the name has stuck.
DSF: What are the best and worst parts of your job?
KC: The best part is as Mel Brooks once said, “It’s great to be King.” What I mean by that is the ability to help set a direction for a whole institution and all its aspects and not just one area like Advancement, Academic Affairs or Finance as I used to. Making the basic decisions – the buck stops here – is a great part of the job. Second is the ability and chances to communicate that more frequently in this job than any other job you can get in a college or university. You can communicate it both on campus as well as off campus. I do a TV show that I have done for 5 years here, a segment on the local morning news that’s called “Choosing a College.” I do it every month, and talk about what students should be doing that month if they’re following the typical college selection process. I probably wouldn’t be able to do that if I was CFO or a faculty member. Third is making a difference. I can see things getting built or programs being started much more directly than any other job I have ever held.
What I don’t like is the “end run game when parents or students won’t deal with a “mere” Vice President or Dean, but insist that only the President can handle their problem. It happens all the time. I have been asked to change grades. I have been asked to add a student to a varsity football squad. I have been asked to intervene when a faculty member is being mean to a student. I have been asked to deal with a roommate problem. Many times I am being asked to tell a student something that the parents don’t want to tell them directly, which I find stunning. I also don’t like is the loss of civility. That’s a cultural phenomenon that we all suffer from. E-mail contributes to that. By the way, I could make a fortune if I could come up with an e-mail program that would scan for certain nasty or tasteless words in e-mail messages. If any appear before they send the e-mail, a little warning sign would pop up that asks “do you really want to send this e-mail?” or “wouldn’t you like to sit on this for a while before you send it?” What some people put in e-mails is outrageous. And once you say or write something like that, it’s as out of your control as the chimes on a clock tower.
DSF: What are your hobbies?
KC: I play tennis, and go to the gym. I love international travel. I also like talking politics, reading history, and am always a sucker for a gourmet meal, a fine wine, and a good Broadway show. I also watch sports a lot, particularly big time college football. I go back every Fall for a reunion of some former students at Michigan State 35 years ago, and we go to a football game. It’s either the University of Michigan or Notre Dame vs. Michigan State game. Because one of the former students is the Budget Director at MSU, we get very good seats. In fact, I was the faculty advisor to the Delta Sig chapter there. I also like watching basketball for a number of reasons, including the fact that in North Carolina, basketball is really the state religion. One of our Guilford students made 90-foot shot to win an away basketball game that was among the sports clips of the year on ESPN.
DSF: What’s a piece of advice that you would give to other Delta Sigs about being successful?
KC: Live your passion and tell the truth. Live your passion means what do you want to do? What makes you happy – not what your parents told you would make you happy, not what your friends are doing, but what is your passion? And sometimes your passion is going to make you rich, and sometimes it’s going to make you poor. But trust me, rich or poor, if you’re doing what you love doing you’ll be a lot better off than the alternative. The second is tell the truth, because as Mark Twain said, it’s easier to tell the truth than it is to keep track of your lies. Telling the truth is a nice habit because it’s morally correct, but it also gives you a reputation and a cachè out there in the job market or in the family market. Being known as a straight shooter and someone whose word is his bond will take you very far, much further than people who will on occasion tell people what they want to hear or just lie. That’s unacceptable.
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